If you’re a nice guy like me, then you’ll want to be straight up and honest with people but telling the truth can often be a bad thing to do.

You see it entirely depends on who you’re talking to as to what degree of truth you should say.

One of the lessons you’ll need to learn fast is who you can actually tell the truth too, and with the rest the basic principal of saying nothing is often the best route of choice.

There are of course people that you will have to tell little white lies to, but over whelming silence is your best option in most circumstances.

If you’re thrown a curve ball, told an insider secret or given some exciting news the last thing you should do, no matter how tempting is go and tell people.

There are many reason for this, but overall what you will find with news that’s super exciting is that all too often it’s also subject to change.

The control of information is often a management tool in order to express their power; yet giving away too much information too early can often undermine your position in the long term.

Instead you should reveal information to those that need to know only when they need to know.

There are many examples of instances when giving out information needs to be worded wisely.

For example I had a friend that after taking over a business gave all his staff a pay rise because he felt that they were over worked and under payed. He explained that he felt the team had had a bad deal and that was his reason for increasing everyone’s pay; yet because the message was delivered in such a way as to say they had been short changed in the past rather than thank him for the pay rise the staff demanded that the pay rise be back dated.

In a similar vein, another friend found out some news about a new product his company was due to be offering so ran to tell his sales team; the new product never happened but he remained the butt of every joke for months to come.

When deciding what information to give away you need to consider the implications of not giving that information rather than the implications of doing so.

You see most information is useless, it does nothing more than fluff out a conversation and in truth is said simply to make conversation yet the effects of giving away snippets can often outweigh the small pleasure of 10 seconds of glory.

Information is powerful and with the effect of Chinese whispers, the filter of information is out of your control once you let it free.

You need to be careful who you trust that information to; often even the most innocent of slips can be regurgitated to you when you least expect it.

In the world of business, most managers are politician’s foremost and business people last; they may tell you they have your best interests at heart but in reality everyone is operating to their own agenda and very few people will put your confidence above that.

In summary then, keep the circle of trust small and for everyone else remain tight lipped.

Chapter Summary:

• Be careful who you give valuable information to
• Only tell people the information they need to know
• Think about the effects of not telling people information

Read our next post “The invention of value”.